First Week Post Scoliosis Surgery

Hi thought I should give every on an update because it’s been some time since I posted and getting the hard word from the missus! Nice to have her slightly back to normal :)... So it’s been about 1 week today since her op and it has certainly been up and down...

Chrissy's bandage (Haven't managed to get one with it off yet, but I will)

Day two after the op was surprising good... I was so pleased how Chrissy was doing, she was perky and reasonably upbeat considering what she had been through. The nurse came in first thing in the morning and took her ‘space boots’ as she called them off. These were basically inflatable lower leg wraps which stopped her getting Deep Vein Thrombosis while she was immobile. Mr Tucker came to visit about midday to check up on her. He said she was certainly ahead of the game after standing on the first day but did say that she was probably on a high after having the op over and not to expect all days to be like this.

How right he was... Day 3 after the op was pretty much a 180 degree turn. Chrissy was very very ill, Im not sure it was because of the op and the general anaesthetic or because of the concoction of pain killers she was on. Lesser of two evils it seemed to me really, be in pain or feel sick because of the drugs... By this stage she had been taken of the intravenous morphine but was starting to really feel the pain. They decided to give her morphine orally which I don’t think was the best thing for her. After about an hour she started to dry retch which you can imagine must really hurt after major spinal surgery so they took action and gave her an anti-sickness shot in the bum. She had very little mobilisation on this day because of how bad she had been feeling and was still yet to eat anything.

Day 4 after the op was generally a good day, she woke up ate 3 triangles of toast, some carrots and potatoes for lunch, and a few bits of pasta and soup for dinner. This was the first day Chrissy had managed to eat at all since going under the knife. Being taken her off the morphine completely was the best thing for her in my opinion. Her friend Lindsay also came in to visit in the evening with Krispy Kremes which I am sure also cheered her up. About 10pm Chrissy started to experience quite bad back pain again, didn’t have a great sleep and woke up at 5am feeling really nauseous. The previous night she had had a lot of problems sleeping so they gave her a sleeping pill to knock her out but it didn’t seem to help a massive amount.

The nausea carried through to day 5 and the anti-sickness medicines were not working well at all. So I came up from work to spend some time with her in the hospital. Chrissy was finding it really difficult to drink and I was constantly on her back trying to get her to drink more. The nurses said this may be one of the reasons that she was getting so ill as she was not taking in enough fluids to flush her system of the medicine. One thing that did help her take in the water was eating ice chips. She didn’t eat any food on this day and I even had to hide it from her sight she felt so sick. One positive for the day was the man came in to make a cast for her back brace (picture below) and he said her back looked 10 out of 10!